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I think that's hugely dependent on the country. For languages with relatively few speakers translating (technical) texts into English is relatively more expensive, so people have to read more English to read e.g. books on programming. That makes them more proficient in reading English, thus decreasing the market for more expensive translations, leading to fewer translations, etc.

Learning programming from English texts will affect choice of variable names, function names, etc.

Dijkstra is a counterexample (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semaphore_(programming)#Functio...), but that was in 1965, when there weren't hours of subtitled English-language television each day, or thousands of programming texts that were only available in English.




> I think that's hugely dependent on the country

Quite common in Spain, France and Germany to have code in local language, based on my experience working in these countries.

I already worked as code translator a few times, because of it.

Sometimes it helps to be a polyglot of human languages as well. :)


Spanish is not a language with "relatively few speakers". According to http://www.ethnologue.com/statistics/size and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_number_of_..., it is #2, ahead of English.

German and French (#11 and #17, at worst) aren't small, either, and have the benefit of having lots of rich speakers.




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